The Bright Brief Thing
The morning Yris saw the child sleeping under her plum tree, she assumed he was one of her cousins’ children, sent without warning, and went inside to fetch a second cup.
When she came back he was awake and looking at her with the curiosity of small things before they have learned to be frightened. He was three winters old, give or take. He was dressed in a brown wool jumper and a pair of trousers too big for him.
He had a leaf stuck in his hair.
“Hello,” said Yris.
The child said hello back. He said it in the tongue of the town beyond the lane, not in any of the tongues of her cousins.
“Are you hungry?” she said.
The child nodded.
She gave him bread and honey. He ate it like a creature that hadn’t been fed in a while. Yris watched him with her chin on her hand and thought: which cousin? Whose? She’d run out of cousins she knew, but there were always more cousins.
The Anavast were a wide and forgetful clan. They’d lost the thread of themselves several centuries ago and never quite picked it up again. Children turned up sometimes. They left sometimes too. You didn’t ask too many questions.
So she kept him.
She named him Asto, because he had been sleeping like a fallen star, and because there was an Anavast name that began with those sounds, that she could no longer quite remember.
Her husband Calden came home in the evening and met the child.
Calden didn’t say much in those days. He’d been busy with a problem to do with the river, and his mind was elsewhere, and a new child in the house was less unusual than the problem of the river, so he made room for the child without complaint.
Their daughter Lin was older than Asto by about a hundred and twelve years. She came down from her tower room and looked at the new small thing and laughed.
“Where did this come from?”
“The garden,” said Yris.
“Oh,” said Lin. “All right.”
She picked Asto up and carried him about on her hip, because Lin liked small things and rarely got the chance.
The household settled. A child was a child. The Anavast had always had a soft place for foundlings.
The first oddness was the eating.
Asto ate every day. He ate three times a day, sometimes more. He cried if there was nothing for him at the proper hours. The Anavast ate when they thought of it. In a slow year they didn’t bother at all.
They kept food in the larder because Yris liked making bread, but they could go a long time without.
Asto could not.
“He’s a hungry one,” said Calden, watching the boy finish a bowl of soup.
“They are when they’re small,” said Yris, who had no real evidence for this but said it with confidence.
The second oddness was the sleeping.
Asto slept every night. He slept loud, with snoring and small dreaming sounds. The Anavast didn’t sleep, as such.
They had a slowness that came over them in the long dim months, and a stillness they did in chairs. They didn’t lie down and shut their eyes for eight hours; this was unthinkable.
“He sleeps like the dead,” said Lin, charmed.
“They do when they’re small,” said Yris, with the same confidence as before.
Then there was the growing.
Asto grew. He grew quickly. By the second year he was taller and his hands had got bigger. The Anavast grew, but slowly, over decades.
Lin had taken sixty years to look like she did now. Asto was moving faster.
Yris began to keep a record, in a green book she had used for nothing else, of how fast Asto was growing. She didn’t show Calden. She wasn’t sure yet what the record was telling her.
By the time Asto was seven (or what passed for seven in him), Yris had finished her green book and started a second.
He was tall. He had lost a tooth and grown another in its place. He had skinned both his knees a dozen times.
He had loved a small dog from the town and the dog had died, and Asto had cried for two days. The Anavast had wept with him because they loved him and his crying was contagious, but none of them had quite understood the depth of his grief. Dogs lived such a short time. So did most things he seemed to love.
Yris sat one evening with Calden in front of the fire and said, “I think he’s not ours.”
Calden looked up from his book.
He’d long since dealt with the problem of the river and now had time to think about other things.
“I know,” he said.
“You know?”
“I knew when I saw him eat the soup.”
“And you didn’t say.”
“I didn’t think it mattered.”
Yris looked at the fire.
“He’ll go quick,” she said.
“I know,” said Calden.
“He’ll be old in seventy years. He’ll be gone in ninety.”
“Yes,” said Calden.
“That’s nothing.”
“It’s a lot to him.”
Yris was quiet.
“I love him,” she said.
“I know.”
“Lin loves him.”
“I know.”
“He doesn’t know.”
“No.”
They sat with this for a while. The fire moved. Outside, somewhere down the lane, a cart went past with a man whistling on it. The man would die in four thousand years. Asto would die in eighty. None of them in this house would die at all, or not for a long time yet.
“We’ll have to tell him,” said Yris. “Eventually.”
“Yes.”
“He should know what he is.”
“Yes.”
“Not yet, though.”
“No,” said Calden. “Not yet.”
They told him when he was sixteen, because by then the questions had started.
The differences had begun to trouble him. First came the small puzzles: why his first teeth had fallen out when Lin’s had not, or why he was plagued by a constant, empty hunger that the others never felt. Then came the broader oddness of family gatherings, where he found himself looking down at the tops of the other Anavast children’s heads.
Finally, on a long evening at the end of autumn, he wanted to know why he was heading towards older age, while they were not.
Yris had been waiting for the last one. She’d imagined it many times. She’d rehearsed her answer and never quite settled on one.
In the end she said, “Asto, love. Come and sit down.”
He sat down.
She told him.
She told him about the morning in the garden and the leaf in his hair. She told him she didn’t know where he’d come from.
She told him she had assumed at first, and then she had known. She told him about the second green book.
He listened.
“What am I?” he asked at last.
“You’re a person from the town down the lane,” said Yris. “A human.”
He looked at his hands. They were Anavast hands, in everything but speed and span. Long fingers. Knobbled at the joints. He’d seen Calden’s hands and Lin’s. He’d never wondered why they were so alike.
“How long do I have?” he said.
“Longer than a dog,” said Yris.
“But not as long as us. I’m sorry, love. I am very sorry.”
He thought about this.
“You’re my mum,” he said.
“Of course I am.”
“That’s not a lie.”
“No, love. That’s not a lie.”
“All right then,” he said.
He sat with her by the fire for a while and didn’t speak. After some time Calden came in and sat with them, and after some more time Lin came down and sat with them too, and they were all quiet together. The fire moved. The wind got up in the chimney and sat down again.
“I’ll be old,” Asto said. “And you’ll be the same.”
“Yes,” said Lin. “I’ll be sad for a long time.”
“How long?”
“Always,” said Lin. “Anavast sadness is always. We don’t put it down.”
He thought about this.
“That’s a lot,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Worth it?”
Lin looked at him. She put her long-fingered hand on his cheek. He’d grown taller than she had, and that itself had been a strange thing to live through.
“You’re the brightest thing we’ve had,” she said. “You burn fast. We sit round you for the warmth.”
He cried then. He cried his quick human crying, with the water and the shaking of his shoulders that the Anavast couldn’t quite manage. Yris held him. Lin held his hand. Calden put his own hand on the top of Asto’s head and kept it there.
He was sixteen.
He had sixty or seventy years left.
They sat round his bright burning and held their hands out to it, and outside the dark drew in.
The town below the lane lit its small windows one by one in the dark, and the Anavast house was alight in the middle of it, with a small bright brief thing inside warming all the long ones.
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